The Continuing Crisis

By News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd

Published Feb. 27, 2017

• If You See Something, Say Something: Ricky Berry and his roommate walked in to a CVS store in Richmond, Virginia, in November to ask if it carried sliced cheese but were told no. Minutes later, all the employees walked to the back of the store, hid in a locked room, and called the police. Berry and pal, and a third customer (with a toothache and desperately needing Orajel), were bewildered by the empty store until a Richmond police officer arrived. After observing that the three customers appeared nonthreatening, he mused along with Berry that "this is how weird, apocalyptic movies start." WRIC-TV reported later that the employee who panicked and called police will "possibly" need retraining. [WRIC-TV, 11-23-2016]

• Groundbreaking Legal Work: In October, a court in Australia's Victoria state began considering an appeal on whether three deaf people might be too intellectually challenged to have planned a murder. The prosecutor offered surveillance video of the three in a lobby planning the murder's details via sign language as they waited for an elevator to take them up to the eventual crime scene. [The Age (Melbourne), 10-4-2016]

• Pigs are such complex animals that scientists are studying how to tell the "optimists" from the "pessimists." British researchers writing in a recent Biology Letters described how "proactive" porkers differed from "reactive" ones, and, as with humans, how their particular mood at that time distinguished them as "glass half full" rather than "glass half empty." (Unaddressed, of course, was specifically whether some pigs were actually "optimistic" that the chute at the slaughterhouse might lead to a pleasant outcome.) [Los Angeles Times, 11-15-2016]